


'Til Human Voices Wake Us

by Semira



Series: And We Drown [ Vampire!Sam AU ] [1]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Awesome Bobby, Blood Loss, Character Turned Into Vampire, Dean's Voicemail and Detox Fix-It, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Emotionally Repressed Winchesters, Episode AU: s06e11 Appointment in Samarra, Episode Tag, Episode: s06e12 Like a Virgin, Fix-It, Gen, Hunter Dean, Hurt Sam Winchester, Hurt/Comfort, Major Character Injury, Parental Bobby Singer, Protective Bobby Singer, Sick Sam Winchester, Vampire Cure, Vampire Sam Winchester, Vampire Turning, Vampires, Worried Bobby, slight AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-03
Updated: 2015-10-03
Packaged: 2018-04-24 13:13:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,587
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4920982
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Semira/pseuds/Semira
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Every part of Sam burns. There's blood on his lips that's not his own (not that kind; it doesn't taste right), and even the smallest rustle or crunch of leaves crashes against his eardrums and sends pain splintering through his skull. He's so thirsty. </p><p>Frantic attempts to remember how he got here leave him with a soup of images and impressions—color, tension, blood, pain, desperation. He starts from what he knows. He was on a hunt...</p><p><b>In other words...</b> Still reeling from what happened when Sam was soulless, Bobby gets careless and a vampire turns Sam before they can put it down. Badly wounded, Sam's body uses all its remaining resources in an attempt to slowly heal him, and it's a long way back home. The cravings and even the agony of the cure aren't the worst things Sam has to face.</p>
            </blockquote>





	'Til Human Voices Wake Us

Every part of Sam burns. There's blood on his lips that's not his own (not that kind; it doesn't taste right), and even the smallest rustle or crunch of leaves crashes against his eardrums and sends pain splintering through his skull. He's so thirsty. Frantic attempts to remember how he got here leave him with a soup of images and impressions—color, tension, blood, pain, desperation. He starts from what he knows.

He was on a hunt.

Bobby.

He was with Bobby.

Sam tries to sit up and open his eyes against the blinding light, but a hot bolt of pain knocks him back down, sharp at first and then rolling through him in full-body shudders that start in his neck and chest and throb out to his extremities. He feels something wet spreading. “...'bby?” he manages. His throat is dry, his voice faint and cracked, but he tastes blood on his tongue and teeth.

“Shh, Sam. _Damn it_ , boy, it's never gonna heal if ya don't quit'cher movin'.” Bobby doesn't sound much better, and in his tone there's an edge of fear that Sam isn't sure he's ever heard.

“Dean...?” Sam starts. He opens his eyes for a moment and sees red—sticky blood all over his chin and neck and chest, pulsing out with each breath.

“I said quiet down.” Bobby sighs after a moment, and Sam can imagine the way his face falls before he sighs. “Your brother's out handlin' the Djinn case in Wyoming, remember?”

Vaguely. Facts flicker back to him through the pain. Ever since Sam's been _back_ in his body (though from what he's heard, his soulless body was doing plenty fine without him), things have been different. Dean's been walking on eggshells, starting sentences or stories and then stopping out of some frantic fear that _talking_ about this stuff is going to break Sam's 'wall.' It was the same with the Djinn case. He'd shuffled off, determined to do this one alone.

The worst of it has been Bobby, though, the way he can't let Sam stand behind him, the way he stares at Sam with narrowed eyes when he putters around the living room. Bobby _flinches_ when Sam comes near him.

When Sam begged Bobby to tell him what he did wrong so he could fix it, the grizzled old man had clenched his teeth and looked off into the distance. Further demands for answers just got him a bit-out, “Jesus Christ, boy, leave it be!”

Sam has heard enough to know that he hurt Bobby when he was... when he was _that thing._ It's only the masochist in him that needs to hear the full story.

Then Bobby had caught wind of a murder a few hours north—obviously a vampire, probably working alone—and had spent a few minutes pursing his lips and pacing before he'd told Sam to pack up.

Sam had thought things were getting better, but Bobby was quiet all the way up, insisting that Sam take point, and then.... no. He doesn't remember much after that.

A realization slithers into Sam's mind with all the grace of a snake, and he coughs out a wet laugh and mutters, “Thought it was... s'pposed to be my whole life.”

“Your what?”

“When you're dying... your whole life and all that,” Sam clarifies.

Bobby inhales—a tight whistle of breath—and presses something hard against Sam's chest.

“You're not _dyin',_ Sam.”

Sam almost thinks he hears regret in Bobby's voice.

“Uh...” He closes his eyes for a moment, tries to orient himself. “Okay? That's...” His voice chokes out for a moment as the sun comes out from behind roiling gray clouds, impossibly bright and painful. He rolls onto his side, lifting both arms to cover his face despite the pain in his neck and chest.

Bobby curses, rough and low, and the next thing Sam knows, there's cloth over his face, body-warm and reeking of sweat and alcohol. The smell is almost as bad as the brightness, almost as bad as this sudden _noise._ Everything everywhere is teaming up against him, each sound magnified, and it's like the migraine that just won't quit.

Sam still feels blood rushing out of him, but it's slower. Normally, that would be a bad thing: if your chest is ripped open and you're not bleeding, you're halfway to hell—no two ways about it.

But the pain is receding, and Sam still has feeling in his fingers and toes. He's dizzy and thirsty but he's not quite in shock. His gut cramps all of a sudden—that weird, aching nausea that either means he's going to be sick or he hasn't eaten in days.

“What...” he starts, “Bobby, w-what...happened?”

The pause lasts too long, just like all the pauses recently.

“Bobby, what's wrong?”

Bobby leans over him, and Sam lets out a relieved sigh in the shade Bobby casts. “Y'don't remember?” When Sam doesn't answer, Bobby keeps going. “Remember... what we were hunting?”

Sam forces himself to focus, but his brain feels like mush.

Well, he didn't get into Stanford by being stupid. He looks around, trying to focus through the pain and the weakness, and when his eyes settle on the blood-stained machete, it all comes together in a sickening rush.

“Vampires,” he says. “We were...” he trails off. He must have gotten attacked, must have somehow swallowed some of the vamp's blood. “Oh, God...” and like a wound acknowledged, the aching in his stomach makes itself known as hunger, and Sam whimpers and turns onto his side. The sounds all around him are still deafening, but they resolve into distinct sources.

He can hear Bobby's blood roaring through his veins, and he needs it.

“Bobby, please,” he moans.

“Shhh, boy. Listen here; I'm gonna get you in the truck, all right? Gonna get you back.”

“No no no—Bobby, please. I'm—whatever...” Fuck, it _hurts_. “Whatever I did when he was... when I was... however I hurt you, I'm so sorry. I'm sorry, Bobby.”

“Shut up and _listen_. Sam, I'm try'na—”

Sam shakes his head, squinting into the light to where the blood-stained machete lies on the grass. Sam _needs_ blood, and he's not going to let himself kill anyone. Bobby has to put him down.

His chest still burns, but he recognizes, now, that the wound is trying to heal itself. What looks to have been a ragged mess of bites and ragged slices is now milder—no less grisly but certainly not deadly anymore.

He recognizes the dryness of his throat for what it is, and he considers, for a moment, how easy it would be to sit up and _drink._

Sam knows the agony of restraint about as well as he knows anything in life, though. Sometimes he still finds himself remembering the texture and taste of Demon blood.

He can restrain himself for as long as it will take Bobby to kill him. He could abstain for days if he needed to. “Bobby, just... make it quick. I mean—you don't have to...”

Bobby leans closer, grabbing Sam's shoulder and shaking him once, hard. “Jesus, boy, I'm not gonna _kill_ ya.”

“You're...? What?”

“Now I might have to truss ya up to keep you from going Dracula on my ass, but I'm gonna take you back to the panic room and we're gonna fix this.”

Sam shakes his head. _This can't be fixed. It's inside him._ “Bobby, if you won't do it—” He reaches out for the machete, stopping when Bobby flinches again, shoulders drawing back defensively.

Sam stops, stills, like a dog showing his belly.

He needs to remember what he did so he can figure out how to apologize. Whatever he's done, it was bad enough to reduce this old, gruff hunter to _this._

“Oh _shee-it,_ ” Bobby says after a moment, shoulders relaxing, and he lets out a sigh that almost sounds like old times. “Boy, I will whack you _good_ if you keep going for that blade, you hear? There's gotta be a limit to your self-sacrificing idiocy.”

Sam tilts his head, hand still outstretched but still...waiting.

“You don't remember what happened,” Bobby starts.

Sam winces, and Bobby scoffs.

“We'll talk about that later, and I... it was a hell of an evening, but I... I was just bein' an ornery old bastard, holdin' it against you. I been watchin' you since you were in diapers almost, and I know that wasn't you... wasn't all you—hell. It wasn't _enough_ of you to actually pin the blame on. But the thing I should be tellin' you is that we gotta get you back so I can whip up the cure.” He gestures to the messily decapitated body a few yards in the opposite direction. “Got the blood of the vamp that turned ya—hardest part already out of the way.”

Sam's brain shuts down as Bobby continues. “A cure...?”

“Yeah... it's a long story you're gonna have to hear from your brother, but we learned while you were—uh. We figured out that a vampire can be cured _if_ he hasn't fed.”

Bobby grunts as he takes a fistful of Sam's jacket and tries to pull him to a sitting position. “Now I have more whiskey runnin' through my veins than blood, but I still count, so I'm 'nna need you to resist the urge to chew on me or anyone else. Worst case, I... I still have some of that dead man's blood, so,” he ends the sentence there, fixing Sam with a stare that begs him not to make him use it.

Sam's vision swims when he gets upright, the hunger returning with a fierceness that makes his new teeth drop.

Bobby doesn't let go of his shoulder, and Sam gets himself under control after a minute.

Bobby offers Sam a crooked grin, the same old dry blend of bitter and sad that Sam has known for years. “Good. Y'know, boy, you got more gall'n me or your brother or your dad ever gave you credit for. You ready to stand up?”

Sam clenches his teeth in preparation to rise.

The thing is, he doesn't _know_ if he's ready, but he does know that he'll do it. There's a sort of peace in the certainty of that, a strength gleaned from Bobby's steady hands and fearless gaze.

Sam stands, shivering and draping Bobby's vest over his head and shoulders. It's true that sunlight doesn't kill vampires, but it feels awful—sweeping needle-pricks on his skin, too hot and then too cold. Bobby gathers as much blood as he can from the corpse and leaves it there, muttering about calling Rufus to clean up their mess.

Sam doesn't remember, later, how he kept on his feet all the way to the car, but he does it.

He slips into a delirious haze of hunger and pain just as he hears the engine of Bobby's old junker groan to life.

From the front seat, Bobby mutters, “Long way back to Sioux Falls,” like it's an apology.

“Yeah,” Sam rasps, an absolution. He relaxes into the haze of discomfort and focuses on the sound of his heartbeats.

He doesn't mind. It's always a long way back.

-oOo-

The next thing Sam became aware of was Bobby's voice, low but gaining volume. “C'mon, boy... damn it—...Sam? Sam, can ya hear me?”

Speaking through the dryness of his raw throat is sheer agony. “Mm?” he manages. He tries to wave a hand to let Bobby know he's awake, but healing has stolen his last reserves, and every movement brings pangs of blinding hunger. The sun isn't helping. Bobby has done all he can to cover the windows with old blankets and even his jacket, but the light still makes his skin feel raw and too tight, like a moderately bad sunburn.

It's worse than the demon blood cravings (not worse than detox, though). Not even Ruby let him get quite this bad. She was invested in his health because she had a plan for him. She only let him get desperate enough to suit her agenda.

Now, he has absolutely nothing to sustain him—barely enough strength to even move. Hearing returns slowly but not completely. Everything comes to him through the persistent buzzing in his ears.

Bobby slings an arm over the back seat, and Sam's eyes track the movement. His muscles coil against his will, aching to spring forward and grab the vulnerable limb. Sam is in no condition to suppress the whimper that tears from his throat as his new teeth drop, but he can force his eyes away.

“Jesus!” Bobby mutters, and retracts his arm. “Sorry—like danglin' a steak in front of a starving vegetarian.” He sighs. “Y' hear what I was sayin' before? … 'bout an hour out, Sam—tank's down to fumes. I've gotta stop to refuel and I need to know you'll be okay.”

Sam swallows past the dryness and pain in his throat. “...Ha—” he starts, but his voice breaks. He tries again in a whisper, barely-voiced. “Have to be,” he says.

Bobby nods. That's that, really.

He pulls into the station, and Sam forces his muscles to relax one at the time. The scent of people and cheap gas station food and gasoline curdles the contents of his stomach and makes him turn his head and retch. The buzzing ratchets up a notch, driven to impossible levels by the sounds all around him—laughter, tapping feet, heartbeats, coughing, crinkling plastic and the rush of fuel roaring through the pumps.

There must have been a big bus or something, because most of the sounds go away right as a big engine growls to life and then there's almost no sound at all—only a few heartbeats and Bobby's grumbling.

The silence saves his throbbing head, but it also gives him too much space to think.

Sam tries to sink into the haze again and ignore the hunger gnawing and clawing through his gut, but just as he's lingering on the razor-edge between wakefulness and unconsciousness, two things catch his attention and catapult him upright.

He smells Bobby, coming out of the door of the tiny gas station (with a bean burrito of some sort if Sam has to guess), and behind that, he smells one of _them_. A vampire. It smells a lot like the one who bit Sam, and he _knows_ —almost instinctively—that this thing isn't human. That it's angry beyond reason.

It's after Bobby.

Of course it is.

Sam doesn't have the strength to hold back the noise of pain he makes when he forces his cramping muscles to obey him even though they're starving. His vision blacks out, head spinning, and he holds on to consciousness only by biting through his lip with his teeth and tasting his own unsatisfying blood.

Sam isn't fast enough. (When has he ever been?)

He hears Bobby curse and grunt, crashing to the ground, hears a woman's low voice, hissing, as he forces himself onto his feet as the black spots across his vision clear enough to let him see. The woman has latched on to Bobby's arm.

“Heard you,” she's hissing, eyes wide and expression enraged and wrecked with grief. “Heard you treating my mate like he's only worth the blood in his body.”

Sam shakes, swallowing at the sight of blood dripping from Bobby's arm to the ground, red and vital, the scent hitting him like a blow to the stomach. His lips part, tongue flicking out to lap at his own blood to try to sate himself.

Sam realizes he has a machete in his hand, and he almost laughs at the ridiculousness of it. He doesn't remember grabbing it, can't summon the strength to wield it.

“And _you_ ,” the woman growls, gaze pinning Sam. Her bloody lips part in an ugly smile that shakes Sam down to his bones.

She moves before Sam can even take a shaky step forward, wiping blood from her mouth with a whip-quick motion.

Sam's brain realizes what she's up to far before his body can react.

He barely manages to clamp his lips shut before she's on him, smearing Bobby's fresh blood against his lips. Everything inside him screams at him to open his mouth and take it in, but he doesn't listen. He seals his mouth tight enough to bruise as she rubs the intoxicating substance everywhere—his nose, his lips, the lids of his closed eyes.

Tears leak out at the strength it takes just to remain standing, and he uses everything he has in him just to push her away.

He hears a grunt as she falls, hears Bobby curse—“Christ, boy, plug your nose for me, will ya? Keep them eyes closed, too.”

He takes almost too long to do that, knees knocking, and Bobby's rough hand bends him over.

He smells it before he feels it—the acrid and nauseating scent of gasoline before Bobby's pouring it over his face and rubbing the blood away. Bobby scrubs at him with some sort of cloth, mumbling strings of colorful language under his breath. One hand pushes Sam against the car to keep him upright, and thank God the smell of gasoline is strong enough to make even the smell of blood nauseating.

Too nauseating, in fact.

As Bobby wets the rag with more of the fluid and scrubs it over his eyelids—“Close 'em tight”—Sam shakes his head and doubles over, gagging.

There's nothing in his stomach to come up, though, and Bobby returns with sun-warmed water and cleans his face a third time before shoving him into the back seat again.

“Open your eyes now, Sam,” he rasps.

Sam does, and everything is wavering and too-colorful.

“Did _any_ of it get in your mouth? Even a bit?”

Sam shrugs. “Don't... don't think so,” he whispers. He doesn't know.

Bobby inhales, a ragged sound that's the closest Sam's ever really heard him to tears. “Your teeth are bloody, Sam.”

Sam thinks about that for a long moment, licks the substance. “M-mine,” he concludes, and bares the ragged insides of his lips for Bobby.

“Jesus, scared me half to death,” Bobby says, but the fear is still there; the fact that Sam had open wounds at the time opens up whole new avenues of possibility, never mind the likelihood of it getting into his bloodstream through mucous membranes. “All right. Give me a sec to flash a badge at the kid at the counter. before I shove the 'criminal' into the trunk. She's got enough dead man's blood in 'er to drop an elephant.”

Sam counts the seconds while Bobby is gone. He doesn't dart his tongue out to lick his lips, afraid of what he'll find there. The smell of gasoline still makes his stomach roil. He's seen Bobby clean his hands and forearms with the stuff to get the grease off after working on cars. He supposes he should just feel lucky that Bobby doesn't smoke. Having his face ignite would be a suitable end to this extremely shitty day.

Before long, they're back on the road, and Sam can feel the tension in Bobby's body like it's his own.

The next forty-five minutes seem to take years.

The car smells like blood and gasoline the whole way home.

-oOo-

Bobby supports most of Sam's weight out of the car and locks him down in the panic room while he prepares the cure.

“I'll be back, all right?” he promises.

Sam doesn't put too much stock in the promise. Once or twice, during one detox or the other, someone promised to come back. They never did.

Again, he loses track of time while he waits for Bobby to return. Bobby tied him down good (temporary measure, he assured Sam) and the forced stillness is made worse by the fact that his muscles are knotting and cramping. He has only a fraction of the strength that should come with being a vampire, probably due to the resources his body has expended to heal him. Even now, it tries to repair the damage caused by the sun.

Sam knows that it's been over a year, but he remembers Lucifer and the last demon blood detox like it was yesterday. It was, really. His time in the cage is locked away with the rest of his memories, so his most recent recollections are of his time right before Lucifer went down.

A breathy laugh pushes out of his throat at his realization that he almost misses that time. Before he went down with Lucifer, Dean _trusted_ him, treated him like an equal. Now that's all gone. Dean's back to treating him like he's breakable half the time and poisonous the rest of it.

Time passes in agonizing increments. Pain throbs through his skull, beating out each second that passes. Cold sweat pricks up on his skin and makes his whole body shudder, and blackness dances along his vision when he thrashes his head to distract himself from the pain (and the fear). Bobby's blood could easily have entered his bloodstream through the mucous membranes of his nose or eyes. The tiniest drop could have joined with his own blood in his mouth, and he'd never know. He doesn't know what Bobby meant by “feeding.” Does he actually have to fill his belly, or will a drop of human blood do the trick?

After too long, he hears slow, steady footsteps and a soft knock, and he manages a pale smile when Bobby tiptoes into the room. Seeing such a gruff man sneaking around for Sam's sake hits him right in the gut. “Thanks, Bobby,” he whispers.

Bobby shakes his head, fond smile fading. “I ain't the one who deserves thanks here.”

Sam forces his eyes to focus at the tone of Bobby's voice. “Wh—... what do you mean?”

Bobby bends and unclasps the cuffs around Sam's wrists. “I mean this one's on me, kid. I was... I was angry at—well, not at you, exactly, but at that soulless bastard—and, well... I let it get to me. I'm an old hunter.” Bobby kneels and sets the cure down, bones audibly creaking. “I know as well as anyone that huntin' pairs need to trust each other absolutely, but I went against my better judgment and took you out on a hunt I could have assigned to three different capable hunters. I know you don't need protectin' like you're a kid, Sam. One day your brother'll figure that out for 'imself, too, but you deserved an attentive partner on this hunt today. This happened because of me.”

Sam shakes his head, ignoring the throbbing pain of his headache. “Bobby, no—”

“Don't interrupt me. You need to hear this. I was—I just got too busy watchin' you, like you were the danger instead of the damned vamp, and I missed him comin' up right behind me.”

Sam wants to argue, but his memories of what happened are still vague. He presses his lips together instead.

“Came up right behind me and woulda made ground beef outta my neck if you hadn't pushed me outta the way. I'm an old man, Sam. Been toyin' with death ever since Karen, and only reason I'm still here is you. You and your brother. Every time I wanna quit I think maybe you'll call, or you'll get yourself in trouble and need me to be the Assistant Director of the CIA or somethin'.”

Sam clenches his eyes shut against the sting of tears. This whole speech sounds too much like goodbye. His next breath hitches on its way in, and he bites down again on his ragged lip.

“And now because I was a stupid old bastard, you're the one layin' here again.”

“Bobby,” Sam rasps, tasting blood. If the cure doesn't work, he's got to get this one thing through. “This isn't on you. The vamp...”

“And I just made way for him like a fool. And I've been a coward in the past.” He chuckles, dry and mirthless. “Drank myself stupid when you were down here last year screamin'. I told Dean he'd kill you, but did I come down to help? Nah. I just sat up there 'n drank.”

“Bobby...”

“I'm talkin'. You'll get your turn.” Bobby waits a moment, turning to look at Sam from under the shadow of the ever-present ball-cap. This close, especially with his enhanced senses, Sam can smell sweat and age and grease and gasoline and whatever food Bobby's wiped on the brim. His eyes look a little wet, but Sam won't ever say anything about it. Bobby grunts and continues. “Now I know I've never been... know I'm not the father you boys deserve, not even close, but you deserve better, Sam. And I'm sorry. I know... that thing, it wasn't you, but it sure as hell looked like you, and I got all prissy 'n pissy 'cause I felt like I'd done a lot for you and you—that thing with your body—just stepped all over that.”

Sam turns away at the reminder of what he did.

“But that thing wasn't the first to step on it, and I had my soul when I did it, so... I'm sorry. And whatever happens with this cure, I promise we'll figure this out.”

Sam forces a raw laugh out, shaking his head. Tears burn hot trails down the side of his face. “Don't lie to me, Bobby. Not now.”

The older man gets to his knees and picks up the cure, slowly creaking to his feet and heading over to the wall to gather things. He comes back and sets them down.

“I'm not,” he says, firm and strong as Sam's ever heard him. “I'm'nna be here through whatever happens, and I don't care if you come out the other side of this with an extra set of chompers or not. We'll figure it out.”

Sam meets Bobby's gaze and flinches at the weight of it. “You know you don't mean that. Dean wouldn't accept a monster as a brother. He... called me a vampire before, y'know, when I drank the blood. No way he'd work with an actual vampire. He'd kill me first.”

“You let me deal with your brother. I don't know what he said or didn't say, Sam, but you've made some mistakes—some whoppers—like we all have. The stakes on yours just happened to be bigger than we could know and stacked against you since before you were born. If anyone in this room is a monster, Sam, it's not you.”

Sam opens his mouth to argue but gets shushed with a firm hand and mutter from Bobby.

“Now, you ready to drink this cure?”

“Bobby, I...”

“I'm gonna wait here. It's not gonna be pleasant, and even if it doesn't work, it won't be easy on you. I heard De—uh, last person the cure got tried out on, there was a lot of writhing and projectile vomiting. Horror-movie stuff.” With a wry grin, Bobby raises a metal bucket. "Ain't gonna be pretty for either of us."

Sam smiles. “I've got this,” he says.

“I know you do,” Bobby answers, and then says it again, lower—as if to himself. “I know.”

Sam's hands are already shaking, so Bobby helps him grip the cure in one hand.

“Bottoms up,” Sam says. He drinks the whole nasty concoction in one gulp.

**Author's Note:**

> This started out as a request for [lillysilverus](http://lillysilverus.tumblr.com/) on [Tumblr](http://semirahrose.tumblr.com) and was supposed to be a few hundred words. The prompt requested Bobby giving Sam the cold shoulder after he got his soul back and then reconciling after Sam saved him during a hunt. The idea ran away with me, turning into a several-thousand word story, and now I really want to make this into a canon AU 'verse in which Sam is a vampire and see how that changes canon events (Vampire!Sam hallucinating Lucifer? Vampire!Sam and the Trials? Vampire!Sam tries to save demon!Dean?). 
> 
> Would anyone be interested in something like that? They won't posted as additional chapters here; I'll make a series of it with connected but independent stories. As always, any comments/crit would be adored!


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